Known Key Symbolism 2018: Hypnagogia and Sleep Paralysis

This is part five of my prefatory series. It will only be viable (within a main index) on my main dream journal. So far, I have explained, as concisely as I could, four common dream components.

I have included hypnagogia and sleep paralysis in the same entry despite, in my own (apparently unique) experience; the two events are completely unrelated despite numerous articles I have read that link them together. For me, reading articles about hypnagogia or sleep paralysis is pointless and here is why:

People talk about “suffering” from sleep paralysis or hypnagogia, or that it “scares” them, which has never made any sense to me. They describe “dark figures”, “evil”, a malevolent presence, and so on as if they had some sort of tangibility or potential influence. Sorry people, this is something I have very limited experience with, even in tens of thousands of dreams in my over fifty years of study. There are exceptions, though these have been validated to mostly relate to biologically premonitory events or sometimes rare apnea caused by a combination of eating too close to the sleeping period and while sleeping on my back.

For me, if I find myself in sleep paralysis, I seek to embrace and enhance the experience. I do this by deliberately rolling my eyes up towards my forehead, which typically intensifies the perception of a loving entity being present and sometimes I am annoyed when I feel “she” is gone (though I never see her in this state). I sometimes hear a very pleasing humming sound (which I sometimes perceive as moving in a figure eight above me). I usually feel waves of pleasure moving through my body, from head to toe and back. Eventually, I usually, if I hold the state long enough, feel a rising sensation. I do not see any imagery while in sleep paralysis, I only have enhanced touch and sound, sometimes buzzing (even tangible lovemaking – female on top, especially one event with Zsuzsanna before I came to Australia to be with her). I also perceive in a completely different way than during hypnagogic sequences.

Now, I will go on to describe hypnagogia, which I also find very enjoyable. Since childhood, I like to remain in hypnagogia for at least an hour or more. During this time, which is always wholly lucid (and always had been, even as a toddler), I like to step into and out of dreams by way of conscious will, though I have to wait for the sequence to slow down. This is because when it first starts, it is very rapid, dream settings changing from more than one per second, though gradually becoming slower over time until it is a rate of about one setting every five seconds. Eventually, when it slows down to about ten seconds per change of setting, I step into a setting of my choice. I have done this since earliest memory and it is a very vivid and intriguing experience, but I never mistake it for being real in any way, though I do often slip into non-lucidity. (I did not realize that other people were not like this until I was about eighteen years old. I had read a little about it, mostly in dictionaries, but did not really read that many articles relating to this state. Imagine my surprise, especially when some people call it a “medical problem”. Much of the world is, sadly, very stupid.)

Most feasible settings in hypnagogia are vivid and colorful outdoor settings. This includes beautiful forests with rivers, lakes, and waterfalls (which I have viewed on a day-to-day basis all my life), neighborhoods with interesting houses, farmyards, train stations, and so on. Sometimes it is a beautiful underwater scene (such as coral or sea fans and various species of fish), which I most often just watch without entering (even though I can breathe underwater in the dream state). Sometimes the settings will seem to rapidly shake from side to side, slowly dissolve, to be replaced by some sort of grid or abstract pattern (typically like leaves floating in water and quivering) before becoming a different setting. Such an event usually only occurs once or twice in a sleeping period. For example, in one instance when I was a young boy, I was watching chickens walk around in a farmyard, some of them pecking at the ground (this was before my father decided to change our rabbit farm into a chicken farm). As I continued to view the scene, there was a very subtle roaring sensation and a sort of fizzing effect, and leaf-like patterns that replaced the setting after it quivered side to side (with no actual movement on my part, that is, no movement of my physical body or perceived movement of my dream self).

This is only one form of hypnagogia. Other types are too surreal to view as a legitimate place to “enter”. Curiously, zooming in or out, and longer panning sequences, as seen in movies, had never occurred in my dreams until I had watched television for the first time. To me, this is a very important realization. It tells me that watching television or movies creates a very profound change in the nature of perception. I have never read of anyone else facing up to this fact. This is ironic, in that hypnagogia itself rarely presented anything I had ever seen in waking life, which ultimately convinced me that something else was going on, though I am still not sure what.

Other forms of this state vary. For example, there is a state where I coalesce with other figures, typically only experiencing bliss or an amazing sensation. Glowing human forms (of different implied ages) jump into my chest, making me feel healthier or more vibrant.

There is a state where dream characters also rapidly change, yet while the setting is fully stable, sometimes faster than once per second (which has served as a reinduction trigger in stabilizing lucidity if it has faded, when I begin to become aware of this after about ten minutes).

In still another state, dream characters seem very odd. They may be only half-formed, or they walk around and phase through bushes or walls and sometimes get stuck.

In other states, I am able to summon (solely through automatic expectation) whatever vivid experience I choose. This is typically coalescence with other entities and is always a satisfying energizing experience, and is always near a body of water (such as a river, lake, waterfall, water park, campground, or swimming pool) usually in daylight. I sometimes marvel at the beauty of the water as the surface reflects certain patterns yet simultaneously reveals what is under the surface. As such, I may jump in and out of numerous dreams (at the rate of about one per minute or more) of this nature in about an hour.

Due to how I am apparently different from most people in this way, this particular entry is probably of no use to people who “suffer” from their dreams or dream states. Why am I different? On the one hand, I was a ten-month baby instead of a nine-month baby. While my mother “almost bled to death” giving birth (according to reports), she very quickly recovered. On the other hand, some people have claimed it is related to healing myself after my accident as a toddler when I nearly lost my left hand (when a large shard from a broken mug sliced through my wrist and out the side of my forearm). The nerves and tendons were supposedly too damaged (and reconnected incorrectly in surgery) to ever work again. Somehow though, after I willed myself to gain use of my hand (while both awake and sleeping), the nerves and tendons, even though they had been connected wrongly, began to work to where my hand had full use (with no difference in how I perceived which fingers I was moving as might be expected). Whether or not my deliberate healing of myself through different levels of consciousness changed how I became more aware of other levels of consciousness and their symbolic dynamics, remains unsolved, but it does make sense, as I am typically aware of what dream symbolism is representing as it is occurring, something that most people do not seem able to understand.